Research On Port Logistics Service Quality For Tianjin Port From The View Of Freight Forwarder

With the improvement of Chinese export-oriented economy and modernlogistics becoming more material, port, which is an integrally centralpart of transportation network, has an irreplaceable effect on theallocation of entire community resources. Port logistics relies oninfrastructure and software environment supplied by port to providedifferent functions of logistics service such as warehousing,transportation, freight forwarding, handling, processing, andinformation processing for manufacturers who operate logisticsactivities by themselves and the third party logistics companies thatoffer public service. Rapid development of port puts forward higherrequirements to the quality of port logistics service, under suchconditions, in order to adapt to the competitive situation, ports haveto strive towards providing more comprehensive and diversified portlogistics service. Tianjin Port, the largest comprehensive port innorthern China, whose cargo throughput achieves500million tons andcontainer throughput is13million TEUs by the end of2013, becomes animportant hub port in northern China. Tianjin Port’s good developmentis inseparable from the close cooperation between port and a number ofinterest groups, especially freight forwarding companies which providethird-party logistics service, whose influence should not be overlooked.Both the port and freight forwarding companies take the owner as a commonservice object and work together to provide high-quality logisticservices. Meanwhile, the company is also service receiver who gets theservice supplied by port, so what measures Tianjin Port should take tooffer better services for the freight forwarding company for the purpose of enhancing the overall quality of port logistics service, which isthe focus of this thesis research.In this paper, we find a new perspective, and regard the relationthat port serves freight forwarding company as a starting point, andfrom the perspective of the freight forwarding company being satisfied,to evaluate the quality of Tianjin Port’s port logistics service. Firstly,the paper combs the relevant research literatures and theories, and onthis basis, discusses the relations between the freight forwardingcompany with the port. Then, this paper designs a three-level index systemof logistics service quality for evaluating the quality from five aspectscontaining technical quality, functional quality, physical conditions,soft service conditions, and service price, as well as distributes thesurvey questionnaire to experts and freight forwarding companies havingdifferent size and nature to get statistical data required, and usesthe Fuzzy-AHP method to make an analysis, obtains a fuzzy comprehensiveevaluation result about the quality of Tianjin port logistics service,though exploring the scores in-depth,we can find: the actual perceptionthat forwarding companies evaluate Tianjin port’s port logistics serviceis only in the level of generally beyond the expected. The score of portsecurity, equipment utilization, loading and unloading operationsefficiency, and yard area is relatively high, but the efficiency ofcustoms clearance, the level of cooperation with the business aspect,the collection and distribution conditions and the rate of handlingcustomer complaints should be strengthened. Finally the paper followsby thesis analyzes conclusions and raises effective solutions aimingto improve the quality of Tianjin Port’s port logistics services inview of assuring freight forwarding companies’ satisfaction.